iPad in medicine

The scenario sounds straight out of a sci-fi movie — the doctor pulls out her touch-screen tablet computer from the drawer of instruments. She calls up the patient’s chart with a few taps and proceeds to add a note to the page with her latest diagnosis. A visualization pops up, and she flips the screen over to give the patient an idea of what ails him.

Medicine is a great use case for the iPad and other devices like it. It’s large enough and powerful enough to enable amazing 3D visualizations. Imagine a doctor flying through a CT scan of your body to see what’s wrong. They could look up pictures of various ailments and compare it in person to your illness to help identify the exact ailment and its severity and the solution used in other cases.

And they will need great programmers to write these applications. Cha-ching!

I wonder why this type of thing never took off with tablets. Was it the expense? Lots of PC tablets have discrete GPUs, so processing power wasn’t the problem. They also ran Windows, which is clearly not a terrible platform to develop on. Maybe the touch interfaces were lacking? Maybe doctors’ handwriting was impossible to parse with pen based input.🙂